CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs

Populism Born in Agrarian Revolt

Even though some measure of recovery had been accomplished after
the Panic of 1873 when thousands of farmers had simply run out of
credit, there was a renewed effort by farmers in the 1880s to open
even larger markets abroad to prevent further declines in commodity
prices. Two factors were worrying both agriculture and many of the
nation's businessmen:

1) the failure of the boom to improve the welfare of agriculture
in general, still faced as it was with overproduction and weak
prices, and 2) the renewed efforts by European interests to control,
if not terminate, American efforts to promote exports.

Farmers were also becoming angrier over the fact that as "our
exports increase, the cost of transportation augments in the same
proportion, and the producer is left without profit." While American
foodstuffs had played a significant role in relieving near famine
abroad in the 1870s, many Europeans began to view the cure -- in
the form of price depressing commodities from the US -- as more
damaging than the sickness, and anti-Americanism soon became
pervasive.

In attempting to combat this attitude the United States in 1877
embarked on a geopolitical course for the next two decades that
transformed primary economic concerns with exports into a demand for
the kind of vigorous government action that produces imperial
policy.

Toward the end of the 1880s the nation was faced yet again with
another depression almost as severe as the one in the 1870s. By 1893
a panic was on, followed by a depression that lasted into 1898.
Market prices for corn went from 66 cents a bushel in 1866 to 28
cents at best and ten cents at worst in 1889, and with wheat the
bushel price dropped from $2 a bushel at the end of the Civil War to
70 cents during the same period of time. In some states prices were
even worse. The desperate plight of many farmers at the time is best
illustrated in a story told by South Dakota State University
historian, Dr. Robert Cherny.

A town in Kansas scheduled a community debate on the subject:
Resolved that opportunities have never been better in Kansas. A
lawyer from the town was invited to present the affirmative side of
the question and he sought to do so in eloquent fashion. After he had
completed his argument before a rapt audience a local farmer, a
member of the Farm Alliance movement, was asked to present the
opposing argument. Without a word he stood up, went over to the stove
in the corner of the room, took a shovel and threw a load of corn on
the fire, and then went back to his seat. "Everybody agreed," Dr.
Cherny adds, "he had won the debate."

Coming at the end of a generation of instability and suffering,
many believed the depression of the 1890s to be psychologically and
politically more disruptive than its predecessors. The answer to this
new disaster, government and business leaders contended, was to
enlarge metropolitan or industrial exports, thereby creating more of
a demand in the domestic market for the nation's abundant
agricultural surpluses.

Most of the farm community, of course, viewed such thinking as
another instance of eastern capitalist discrimination and continued
to argue for renewed efforts to expand overseas markets. They also
believed that the key to commercial independence from the East was to
first become financially independent.

As Southern farmers sought to escape the tyranny of sharecropping
and the "furnishing merchant" system and western farmers fought the
tyranny of burgeoning debt and mortgage foreclosures, both believed
they saw American agriculture being driven into involuntary
servitude. They also believed that the democratic promise was being
destroyed and with it any possibility of individual respect and mass
aspiration.

From a mass democratic movement, which had initially been
generated by a cooperative crusade and which was to become the heart
of the "agrarian revolt," to the formation of the National Farmers
Alliance and Industrial Union, emerged a political movement that came
to be called populism.

Populism, as historian Lawrence Goodwyn reminds us, was
characterized by an evolving democratic culture in which people could
"see themselves" and therefore aspire to a society conducive to mass
human dignity. In stark contrast to their efforts was the direction
they saw being taken by the corporate state in the existing society.
One populist newspaper of the time described the issue in these blunt
terms:

"In the second fifty years of the republic a new power grew up,
unobserved by most men ... Seated in the east, it has dominated the
west and south, has monopolized legislation, fortified itself in the
citadel of national power and bids defiance of those who question its
right."

Populism clearly recognized this condition and thus believed that
it was imperative to bring the corporate state under democratic
control. "Agrarian reformers," Goodwyn points out, "attempted to
overcome a concentrating system of finance capitalism that was rooted
in Eastern commercial banks and which radiated outward through
trunk-line railroad networks to link in a number of common purposes
much of America's consolidating corporate community. Their aim was
structural reform of the American economic system."

The fact that populism achieved a high measure of success for
nearly a decade in the late 1800s explains why in the century since
this "agrarian revolt," corporate America has reacted so strongly and
swiftly to any renewed moves by the nation's farmers to assert that
same economic and political power they so forcefully applied in the
late 1800's.

"In its underlying emotional impulses," Goodwyn tells us,
"populism was a revolt against the narrowing limits of political
debate within capitalism as much as it was a protest against specific
economic injustices. The abundant evidence that 'great aggregations
of capital' could cloak self-interested policies in high moral
purposes -- and have such interpretations disseminated widely and
persuasively through the nation's press -- outraged and frightened
the agrarian reformers, convincing them of the need for a new
political party free of corporate control."

Although many of the "populist" farm policy seeds would later
flower in the form of constructive state and national farm and
anti-corporate legislation, the Peoples Party demise as a political
force came in the 1896 presidential election when the "silverites,"
who proposed unlimited silver coinage, captured control of the Party,
amalgamated with the Democrats as William Jennings Bryan co-opted
much of the "populist" rhetoric, and were beaten decisively by
William McKinley and the Republicans.

Meanwhile, many men, women and children were leaving their farms
during this period to resettle in company mill towns or push further
west in pursuit of the golden dream. Ironically, as each new
invention supposedly manufactured to ease and enrich rural life
reached farms from the nation's mighty industrial machine, farmers
themselves were disappearing into the cities to provide a cheap labor
pool for the manufacturers.

Clearly, the later half of the 19th century was marked by
considerable confusion and shifting values. The new materialistic
"gospel of success" was replacing the ethics of the village and
powerful "captains of industry" like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and
John D. Rockefeller were the emulated heroes of the day.

With the increasing migration from country to city and the
immigration from abroad, the demand for food, large amounts of it,
storable and readily available, became an important part of the
nation's burgeoning economy. Out of this need came the birth of giant
food manufacturing, processing, transporting, wholesaling and
marketing companies which in a few short decades would evolve into
the nation's largest industry -- agribusiness. As they grew farm
technology also grew, but while productivity per person showed
remarkable advances so also did farm debt load.

As we examine the 20th century transformation of agriculture into
corporate agribusiness, we need to remember that this brief history
was but the early stage of a specialized agricultural system designed
to reward the few at the expense of the many.

In reviewing the major historical 19th century environmental
themes Dr. Joseph Petulla in his classic book "American Environmental
History" aptly sums up the early evolution of our farm economy:

"First, I suggest that the economic rationality of American
democracy has tended to lead to economic concentration, a waste of
natural resources; and environmental degradation (also an inequitable
distribution of wealth ...).

"Second, business imperatives, rather than environmental or
social concerns, and technological developments have increased the
exploitation and processing of natural resources.

"Third, at the same time, the nation has become increasingly tied
together through cheap transportation and regional specialization of
resource extraction or processing.

"Fourth, American political policy and legal institutions have
generally supported the logic of private enterprise development,
promoting and defending individual private property rights over
social and environmental concerns, eschewing control of private lands
even for purposes of conservation; and also providing abundant
government assistance for the profitable purposes of agriculture,
lumber, oil and mining interests. The government has increasingly
underwritten the needs of the larger companies representing the more
'rationalized,' efficient sectors of their respective
industries."